There are many good reasons to automate your sales process — it can help reps exceed their quotas by increasing the speed at which they secure new sales, and also improve customer experience and reduce frustration, just to name a few. If your team doesn’t already use sales automation software, or isn’t familiar with the benefits, we’re here to help.
In this article, you’ll find everything you need to know about sales automation, the benefits of automating different parts of the sales cycle and how you can use sales automation software to close more deals.
What is sales automation?
Sales automation uses software, artificial intelligence or other digital tools to automate repetitive manual tasks in order to make it easier for sales teams to focus on building relationships, nurturing leads and closing deals.
Benefits of sales automation
With a good sales automation system in place, your team can do more in less time while ensuring a consistent, streamlined sales process. Sales automation enables you to focus on selling while reducing time spent on manual tasks.
Other benefits include:
Increased efficiency
Automation gives sales teams more time to work on tasks that require human interaction and focus. You can use automated tools to quickly surface qualified prospects so that you can save time on research and instead focus on engaging with prospects and closing deals.
Reduced frustration
Automation can help minimize frustration around some of the tedious or repetitive parts of the sales process. When team members are focused on selling and many of their monotonous tasks have been automated, stress levels can go down significantly.
In addition, sales automation allows your team to follow the same system to close deals, which ensures that everyone is on the same page and working in unison.
Better results
An automated sales process increases precision and accuracy, making it easier to avoid mistakes. It also frees up sales reps’ time so they can be more productive and ultimately improve results.
Additionally, automating your sales process can help finalize more sales and increase your profit. Most sales automation software enables you to see where your customers are in the buying process, so you can send the right message at the right time.
An improved customer experience
Automation speeds up the sales process and allows you to deliver quotes and proposals quickly to keep things moving forward. It can also account for fewer lost leads by prompting sales teams when leads go unaddressed or unanswered for too long.
Sales automation vs. marketing automation
Both sales and marketing automation tools help organizations attract customers, close deals and increase revenue. However, it’s important to understand how they work together within the sales cycle and the key differences between the two.
Generally speaking, marketing automation is focused on the top of the marketing funnel by generating traffic and leads, while sales automation targets customers near the bottom of the funnel by verifying leads and assisting AEs with closing deals.
Marketing automation tools help drive demand by automating marketing campaigns and the lead nurturing process. Ideally, when leads are qualified and fit the profile of an ideal customer with the intent to buy, they’re turned over to sales as marketing-qualified leads (MQLs).
Sales automation tools, on the other hand, help sales reps confirm leads as sales-qualified (SQLs) and close more deals. Classifying a lead as an SQL means your sales team has already assessed these leads as warranting a direct follow-up.
Here’s an example of how sales automation tools can enhance the leads you get from your marketing team:
You’re the manager of a B2B sales team. You receive hundreds of leads per month from marketing, but the leads you receive are generally incomplete (they may be missing a name, email, or phone number).
Using sales automation tools, you’re able to:
- Instantly verify contact data;
- Quickly identify key decision-makers and influencers;
- Find qualified leads in your territory;
- Build a list of similar companies you can target; and
- Create personalized emails customized to your prospects.
You can use automation software to streamline these parts of the sales process and more. Next, we’ll discuss how to optimize your workflow in detail using the best sales automation tools.
Best sales automation tools
These days, there are ways to automate almost any aspect of the sales process. Sales automation software can address specific tasks, or offer full-suite solutions to make it easier to find, engage and convert prospects into paying customers. A few of the best sales automation tools include:
Crunchbase
Best for: all-in-one prospecting; lead enrichment, lead scoring, nurturing, outreach, and follow-up; data management
With Crunchbase, you can go from research to outreach all in one platform and automate the most time-consuming parts of the sales process.
Prospecting
- Recommendations: Automate account discovery and qualification with prospect recommendations and information about why a company or contact is recommended specifically for you.
- Similar companies: Discover companies that resemble your recently closed deals with Crunchbase’s similar companies feature, which uses machine-learning powered software to automatically uncover the accounts you should know about.
Lead enrichment
- Import lists of leads and perform a search within the platform to easily gather the data Crunchbase has on them. After you import, it will automatically populate your list with missing data about the companies on your list.
- Enrich your leads within Salesforce with Crunchbase data. Our Salesforce integration enables you to enrich all new and existing Salesforce account records with Crunchbase’s firmographic and financial data — allowing you to understand a company’s buying potential within Salesforce and perfectly time your outreach.
Lead tracking
- Email alerts: Monitor the companies you’re interested in by setting up email alerts in Crunchbase. Decide which type of news you want to receive (such as additions, funding rounds, news etc) and how often you want to be updated.
Outreach
- Contact data: Leverage verified B2B contact data to find and connect with the right decision-makers at your target companies. Crunchbase’s contact data includes information such as names, titles, job levels, departments, LinkedIn profiles, email addresses and phone numbers
- Engagement suite: Use Crunchbase’s engagement suite to send pre-built email templates tailored to your prospects that integrate intelligent insights about them into your outreach. Crunchbase automatically suggests which data points to incorporate so can you quickly compose a personalized email.
Lead scoring, nurturing, and follow-up
- Shared notes: These can help you and your team store information about previous interactions to inform future outreach and prioritize prospects.
- Shared tags: Use these to prioritize prospects and easily understand which accounts are the most important.
Salesforce
Best for: customer relationship management (CRM)
Larger sales teams often use Salesforce as their CRM, which enables teams to log prospect activity and sales outreach, and can also be used for contact management tasks such as sending emails and adding new deals. With Crunchbase, you can automate adding new accounts to your Salesforce instance by pushing accounts straight from Crunchbase to Salesforce. When you find and save a new account from Crunchbase to the platform, it will also save the basic company information you’ll need to personalize your outreach, allowing you more time to focus on closing deals. And, you’ll be automatically notified if a contact already exists in your CRM, making it easy to avoid duplicating your records.
HubSpot
Best for: CRM
A smaller sales team may be using HubSpot, which is similar to Salesforce in terms of its CRM capabilities. HubSpot is a good choice for businesses with a limited budget that want a tool that’s straightforward and easy to deploy. Like Salesforce, HubSpot is a CRM that can help streamline your sales process. You can easily build and track your pipeline by integrating your HubSpot account with Crunchbase. Quickly discover new prospects, push them directly to HubSpot and inform your outreach with timely insights so you never miss the chance to convert a prospect into an opportunity.
Calendly
Best for: scheduling meetings
Calendly allows you to automate the administrative tasks associated with setting meetings, including scheduling, updating and canceling appointments. The tool can speed up your sales cycle and increase revenue by automatically keeping your meetings moving forward, so you can focus on selling and engaging your prospects.
Sales automation software resources to get you started
Ready to start automating your sales process? Look no further than Crunchbase. Our sales automation capabilities will save you time by handling the tedious and repetitive parts of the sales process, allowing you to focus on what’s more important — closing more deals.
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